Longtime Sour Lake barber David Payne was as well-known for his prowess with scissors as he was for his gift of gab and his status as community stalwart.

Payne died in his sleep Sunday. He was 68.

Payne, a Saratoga native, began cutting hair at the tiny barber shop in downtown Sour Lake in 1964, buying the business in 1970.

He liked to joke that he became a barber because he was too lazy to work and too cautious for a life of crime.

Payne's shop was popular as a spot to hang out, shoot the breeze and solve the world's problems. Its popularity as a hangout might have become firmly cemented when it became home to Sour Lake's first air conditioner.

But Payne did not consider himself "just a barber."

"A good barber is a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a marriage counselor and a bartender, " Payne said in an interview last July. "We kind of have to fulfill all those shoes."

The shop was also well known as "the political capital of Sour Lake," according a 1979 Enterprise story Payne kept in a plastic sleeve in the shop.

He was first elected mayor in 1981, despite not being on the ballot, according to an Aug. 9, 1981 newspaper article.

"Some of the people just said they were going to vote for me, and I told them it's a free country," an Aug. 15, 1981 story quoted Payne as saying. "I told them they could write me in if they wanted to."

He had lived in Sour Lake 17 years at that time and had never held an elected position before, hough he was acting fire chief of the volunteer fire department.